Unless it’s handmade or extremely high-end, most furniture sold in the US is manufactured in China, and the designs are white label, meaning retailers brand and sell identical pieces. Deal Décor figured if we were all buying the same furniture from the same place, there had to be a cheaper way to do it. Today the ecommerce startup launches its furniture deals to California customers and announces seed funding of $1.2 million from angels including Mark Stevens of Sequoia, Rick Thompson, and Saeed Amidi.

Deal Décor places three to five pieces of furniture on sale in a 10-day deal with new pieces launching every week. Getting the deal requires buying in large numbers and, for now, living in California. Deals will be available in more states before the end of the year.

The San Francisco-based startup tested the model at a beta sale last year in the Bay Area where it sold 65 sectional sofas for $399, which it says sells on Amazon and at national furniture stores for $899.

Deal Décor’s website looks a bit ecommerce circa Overstock.com, but the business model is all Warby Parker, among the first to popularize a factory-to-consumer ecommerce model with its designer-identical eyeglass frames from China.

“There’s been an evolution of supply chain in Asia. Agents who negotiated deals have gone away and the wholesaler model is gaining traction,” says co-founder Gregory Lok.

Lok, who has lived in China for eight years, started by visiting the factories that manufacture furniture for retailers like Pottery Barn and Crate and Barrel. He and his co-founder Craig Sakuma had both worked in big box retail for Home Depot and Target. They researched the top selling pieces and negotiated a price with the Chinese manufacturers for a container’s worth to California.

The catch? The container must be full in order to make it a deal. The other catch? The manufacturer will add the order to its existing run, a timetable set by the big name buyers, not Deal Décor.

In its video on how it works, Deal Décor declares the ideal customer “patient and savvy.” Patience is required when an order can take up to 16 weeks. The language on the website also clearly states that enough people must commit to buy to unlock a deal. Lok said filling one container takes about 50 loveseats. Online group buying is a fairly new concept and Deal Décor should be prepared for disappointed customers if a deal doesn’t come through.

Where it may get really tricky is when the furniture arrives in California, Deal Décor’s launch state because it was easy to establish third-party delivery services there. Buyers have an option to pick up furniture, though it’s not clear where, or pay extra to have it delivered, but it’s not clear how much. Ensuring customer satisfaction at this stage will be critical and if Deal Décor pulls it off, it could pave the way for more factory-to-consumer ecommerce models.

“For all the clumsy rhetorical lip service [former Yahoo News head] Guy Vidra pays to The New Republic’s hallowed intellectual traditions, this is what his vision of a nimble digital news product finally translates into: a vaguely journalistic veneer strategically designed to conceal a rancid interior of ‘elevated’ advertising.”

Indian e-commerce company Flipkart is said to be raising $600 million in its latest bid to compete with Amazon. The company is also said to have garnered a higher valuation with this funding round — quite the feat, considering it was previously valued at around $11.5 billion. [Source: The Economic Times]

Here comes another unicorn: Sprinklr, a New York-based marketing company, has raised $46 million at a $1.17 billion valuation. The funds will be used to help the 700-person company expand its marketing platform. [Source: Fortune]

Curator, the tool Twitter created so the media could find and share tweets with its audience, is now available to the public. Because if there’s anything people wanted to see more of, it’s tweets randomly inserted into blog posts, television spots, and other forms of media. [Source: TechCrunch]

A court in France has decided not to ban Uber’s low-cost services until the country’s highest appeals court, or its supreme court, weigh in on the constitutionality of a new transport law. [Source: The Wall Street Journal]

Tinder is refocusing on its spam-fighting efforts in the wake of reports that movie studios are using the service to promote their movies, scammers are attempting to steal information via the app, and pranksters have created tools that trick heterosexual men into flirting with each other. [Source: The Verge]

Uber offers drivers whose accounts have been deactivated a choice: attend a class that requires them to pass an exam, or take a class that doesn’t. The latter has been informed by Uber employees, and the company has sent thousands of drivers to it, according to a report from BuzzFeed. Why is that a problem? Because Uber isn’t supposed to provide its drivers with formal training; doing so makes them bona fide employees, not independent contractors. [Source: BuzzFeed]

Flipboard users will now be able to collect articles and share them via private magazines visible only to members of certain groups. The feature is aimed at students working in the same class, companies sharing press coverage, and other groups that might want an easy way to share Web pages with each other without having to use public tools like Facebook or Twitter. [Source: Flipboard]

T-Mobile has tasked its customers with creating a real-world coverage map that makes it easier to tell where its service works and where it doesn’t. Instead of guessing at where its customers will get service — which is what other carriers do, the company claims — it’s asking people to verify its predictions so it can be more honest with consumers. [Source: T-Mobile]

Amazon isn’t happy that the Federal Aviation Administration wants to restrict how, when, and where it tests the drones it hopes will deliver packages some time in the future. So it’s opened a secret test facility in British Columbia where it can operate without pesky regulators worrying about drones falling out of the sky and hurting bystanders. [Source: The Guardian]

GitHub has been the target of a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack over the last few days, perhaps because the Chinese government wants to prevent anti-censorship tools hosted on the service from spreading. The company now says that it’s able to operate despite the attacks, albeit with intermittent outages. [Source: Reuters]